In this paper, we address multi-modal pretraining of product data in the field of E-commerce. Current multi-modal pretraining methods proposed for image and text modalities lack robustness in the face of modality-missing and modality-noise, which are two pervasive problems of multi-modal product data in real E-commerce scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel method, K3M, which introduces knowledge modality in multi-modal pretraining to correct the noise and supplement the missing of image and text modalities. The modal-encoding layer extracts the features of each modality. The modal-interaction layer is capable of effectively modeling the interaction of multiple modalities, where an initial-interactive feature fusion model is designed to maintain the independence of image modality and text modality, and a structure aggregation module is designed to fuse the information of image, text, and knowledge modalities. We pretrain K3M with three pretraining tasks, including masked object modeling (MOM), masked language modeling (MLM), and link prediction modeling (LPM). Experimental results on a real-world E-commerce dataset and a series of product-based downstream tasks demonstrate that K3M achieves significant improvements in performances than the baseline and state-of-the-art methods when modality-noise or modality-missing exists.

There has been a recent surge of research interest in attacking the problem of social relation inference based on images. Existing works classify social relations mainly by creating complicated graphs of human interactions, or learning the foreground and/or background information of persons and objects, but ignore holistic scene context. The holistic scene refers to the functionality of a place in images, such as dinning room, playground and office. In this paper, by mimicking human understanding on images, we propose an approach of \textbf{PR}actical \textbf{I}nference in \textbf{S}ocial r\textbf{E}lation (PRISE), which concisely learns interactive features of persons and discriminative features of holistic scenes. Technically, we develop a simple and fast relational graph convolutional network to capture interactive features of all persons in one image. To learn the holistic scene feature, we elaborately design a contrastive learning task based on image scene classification. To further boost the performance in social relation inference, we collect and distribute a new large-scale dataset, which consists of about 240 thousand unlabeled images. The extensive experimental results show that our novel learning framework significantly beats the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., PRISE achieves 6.8$\%$ improvement for domain classification in PIPA dataset.

The needs for precisely estimating a student's academic performance have been emphasized with an increasing amount of attention paid to Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). However, since labels for academic performance, such as test scores, are collected from outside of ITS, obtaining the labels is costly, leading to label-scarcity problem which brings challenge in taking machine learning approaches for academic performance prediction. To this end, inspired by the recent advancement of pre-training method in natural language processing community, we propose DPA, a transfer learning framework with Discriminative Pre-training tasks for Academic performance prediction. DPA pre-trains two models, a generator and a discriminator, and fine-tunes the discriminator on academic performance prediction. In DPA's pre-training phase, a sequence of interactions where some tokens are masked is provided to the generator which is trained to reconstruct the original sequence. Then, the discriminator takes an interaction sequence where the masked tokens are replaced by the generator's outputs, and is trained to predict the originalities of all tokens in the sequence. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art generative pre-training method, DPA is more sample efficient, leading to fast convergence to lower academic performance prediction error. We conduct extensive experimental studies on a real-world dataset obtained from a multi-platform ITS application and show that DPA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generative pre-training method with a reduction of 4.05% in mean absolute error and more robust to increased label-scarcity.

To automate the generation of interactive features, recent methods are proposed to either explicitly traverse the interactive feature space or implicitly express the interactions via intermediate activations of some designed models. These two kinds of methods show that there is essentially a trade-off between feature interpretability and efficient search. To possess both of their merits, we propose a novel method named Feature Interaction Via Edge Search (FIVES), which formulates the task of interactive feature generation as searching for edges on the defined feature graph. We first present our theoretical evidence that motivates us to search for interactive features in an inductive manner. Then we instantiate this search strategy by alternatively updating the edge structure and the predictive model of a graph neural network (GNN) associated with the defined feature graph. In this way, the proposed FIVES method traverses a trimmed search space and enables explicit feature generation according to the learned adjacency tensor of the GNN. Experimental results on both benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of FIVES over several state-of-the-art methods.

Precise trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles is critical for decision-making of autonomous vehicles and learning-based approaches are well recognized for the robustness. However, state-of-the-art learning-based methods ignore 1) the feasibility of the vehicle's multi-modal state information for prediction and 2) the mutual exclusive relationship between the global traffic scene receptive fields and the local position resolution when modeling vehicles' interactions, which may influence prediction accuracy. Therefore, we propose a vehicle-descriptor based LSTM model with the dilated convolutional social pooling (VD+DCS-LSTM) to cope with the above issues. First, each vehicle's multi-modal state information is employed as our model's input and a new vehicle descriptor encoded by stacked sparse auto-encoders is proposed to reflect the deep interactive relationships between various states, achieving the optimal feature extraction and effective use of multi-modal inputs. Secondly, the LSTM encoder is used to encode the historical sequences composed of the vehicle descriptor and a novel dilated convolutional social pooling is proposed to improve modeling vehicles' spatial interactions. Thirdly, the LSTM decoder is used to predict the probability distribution of future trajectories based on maneuvers. The validity of the overall model was verified over the NGSIM US-101 and I-80 datasets and our method outperforms the latest benchmark.

Interactive Educational Systems (IESs) have developed rapidly in recent years to address the issue of quality and affordability of education. Analogous to other domains in AI, there are specific tasks of AIEd for which labels are scarce. For instance, labels like exam score and grade are considered important in educational and social context. However, obtaining the labels is costly as they require student actions taken outside the system. Likewise, while student events like course dropout and review correctness are automatically recorded by IESs, they are few in number as the events occur sporadically in practice. A common way of circumventing the label-scarcity problem is the pre-train/fine-tine method. Accordingly, existing works pre-train a model to learn representations of contents in learning items. However, such methods fail to utilize the student interaction data available and model student learning behavior. To this end, we propose assessment modeling, fundamental pre-training tasks for IESs. An assessment is a feature of student-system interactions which can act as pedagogical evaluation, such as student response correctness or timeliness. Assessment modeling is the prediction of assessments conditioned on the surrounding context of interactions. Although it is natural to pre-train interactive features available in large amount, narrowing down the prediction targets to assessments holds relevance to the label-scarce educational problems while reducing irrelevant noises. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work investigating appropriate pre-training method of predicting educational features from student-system interactions. While the effectiveness of different combinations of assessments is open for exploration, we suggest assessment modeling as a guiding principle for selecting proper pre-training tasks for the label-scarce educational problems.

They are a dream of researchers but perhaps a nightmare for highly skilled computer programmers: artificially intelligent machines that can build other artificially intelligent machines. With recent speeches in both Silicon Valley and China, Jeff Dean, one of Google's leading engineers, spotlighted a Google project called AutoML. ML is short for machine learning, referring to computer algorithms that can learn to perform particular tasks on their own by analyzing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine-learning algorithm that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms. With it, Google may soon find a way to create A.I. technology that can partly take the humans out of building the A.I. systems that many believe are the future of the technology industry.